Reading Towards Becoming Causal

The affect reader begins intuitively, a little blindly, recognizing that there is no single, originary place to start. No adequate introduction can pave the ground; there is no safe distance for contemplation. Affect is necessarily apprehended from in its midst. Indeed, the readers body has been working with affect long before a decision is made to read a single sentence on this slippery subject. The readers body experiences the complexity of affect in advance of assigning it a name. Without recourse to language, the body articulates affect with a fluency that words find hard to follow. Other to the world of things and forms and functions, affect speaks of a different reality to that which is named and known. It is an inchoate realm of flows and forces of gradients and intensities, of transitions and relations which the body senses all too well, yet comprehension struggles to make sense of. Or rather, affect is the reality which cognition works so hard keep in check, the seething field of forces that conscious mind strives endlessly to render still or stable. Meaning tends to privilege the determinate, whilst the indeterminate rest is electively ignored. So, mind names thought its conscious workings, attending not to the unnamable volitions and desires that affectively steer its course. The more discernible stirrings are labeled as emotion, affections that must be guarded carefully lest they become unruly, too impulsive or errant. Insurgent feelings must be kept under surveillance, managed with the strictest of control. Signification is a nominal regime whose distinctions fail to account for the suchness of existence, for the truth of reality as it is exceeds the binary categories of this or that. There is always some discrepancy between how life is and how we as humans narrate its unfolding, for we are conditioned to conceive things only as they are mediated through the various systems and structures created by ourselves. The turn towards affect might then be imagined to narrow this gap, paradoxically perhaps, by attending to that which is irreducible to language in hope of a new vocabulary for describing the livingness of how life is. Yet, attempts towards a language for articulating affect are always somehow frustrated, for as soon as it is named it is no longer. Moreover, without due caution, interest in the unknown or under-interrogated can soon twist towards a quest for new intellectual frontiers to territorialize and conquer. Curiosity can slip so quickly towards capture, control. Affective language effervesces, fluttering with the enthusiasm of the collector with his latest trapped bird. Or maybe affect is attractive for its dissonant potential, positioned in critique or counter to the stranglehold of signification, antagonistic to representational codes. Affects resistance to language reveals the limitations of existing linguistic frameworks, for it remains a blind spot or lacuna within encyclopedic thought. Affects asignifying promise seems one of liberatory rupture, a challenge to structural norms based on fixed and definitive identities, which work by giving things a label so to keep them in their place. Affect knows no place only passage. It is no one thing rather the movement between. However, other forces have already begun to harness affects potential, capitalizing on its capacity to move or mobilize bodies in ways that bypass the intellectual rationale. Conservative appeals target our anxieties in the hope of moving us from left to right. Solidarity is surrendered to the collective act of blaming someone else. Shame is a gag to silence. Even charity trades in guilt trips. If affect underpins our capacity to act, it can also render us impotent, immobile. Neoliberalism is an oceanic force, a liquid system in which individual life is buffeted to and fro by capricious winds and

unpredictable currents. Empire amplifies those affects that diminish our potential for action, by nurturing our attachments and aversions, fueling our fears and darkest desires. We are encouraged to follow our passions, swerved in the direction of pacifying pleasures, saccharine sooths sold to numb our pains. Our likes and dislikes are cultivated carefully and publicly, reinforcing our individual sense of identity, our distinctiveness from everyone else. The boundary of the self is now protected with firewalls. Connectivity requires a password. Relations are brokered via portable screens. Channeled through capital, affect creates isolations that can then be duly catered for. Care is privatized; compassion becomes a commodity; love, a service industry. Systems of capture from language to capital create the illusory conditions in which the truth of reality as it is becomes veiled, replaced by constructed representations from which there seems no escape or alternative. We are assured that lifes like that, thats how it is. Moreover, we are ourselves complicit in maintaining these illusions. Indeed, regimes of power are the easier targets, for the fiction that keeps us most alienated is arguably the investment in our own sense of self. A critical turn towards affect might then involve the critique of signifying structures or the wrestling of our affections back from capital so as to act rather than simply be acted upon. But there can be no change until we acknowledge that selfhood is itself something of a construct. To conceive life in affective terms is to apprehend the body not as a fixed entity but as a network of interconnected flows. A bodys capacity is not determined by the power that it can seize or store, but through the quality of its encounters and interactions. So if affect has an emancipatory potential, it comes at some cost. The loss of bearings of certainty, stability, even ones anchorage to self can produce the vertiginous free-fall of both flight and panic. Affect is to be explored cautiously then and with support from others, for it is easy to lose ones way once cast adrift, disoriented. The affect reader gleans fragments from those who have already ventured along this path, as guidance or provocation, as triggers or prompts. Gathering texts is not an academic exercise, however, undertaken for the purposes of surveying the terrain. Affect will not be grasped by intellect alone. Its frequency is non-discursive. Neither does affective reading involve the pursuit of knowledge, the accumulation of cognitive capital. Instead, it is performed as an intervention, as an active decision towards becoming ones own cause. Affect involves reciprocity; the opening of a book requires the reader keeps an open mind. Suspicious reception must be replaced by receptivity, the willingness to be moved by anothers thoughts. Openness does not make the reader suggestible, susceptible only to the rhetorical or emotional tenor of a text. Rather it is an expression of readiness, the germinal ground for change or transformation. The affect reader momentarily suspends certain normative modes of reading, whose explication seeks to fix definitions too hastily, or which cut too quick an argument at its first failing or fault. Affect is not understood by being read about, rather reading is a constitutive practice within which affect is enacted, its flow felt. Reading is a site of rehearsal, where reader and text negotiate one anothers force. Its affective potential is thus amplified by reading in the company of others. Collective acts of reading multiply the affective frictions generated by the rub of one individuals thoughts with those of another. A text that moves a person towards thinking can prohibit someone else. A readers capacity can be both augmented and diminished through their encounter with the written page. Certain texts are toxins creating exhaustion and fatigue; others have the medicinal properties of a tonic. Reading together helps

combat the adverse impact of a troublesome text. A struggle shared is halved. A group can be stronger than the sum of its parts. New meanings emerge in the gaps of prior knowledge. Common understanding is not the product of what is brought to a meeting of minds; rather, it is experientially co-produced through the process of encounter. Less a convivial site for the pleasurable reverie of reading, social interaction around a single text creates the experience of solidarity, the shared labour of sticking at something, working it through. Unexpected collectivities and allegiances are inaugurated in meetings on a page; new constitutions born in readings mutual witnessing. To bear witness to anothers endeavour makes it an occasion. The ritual presence of observers transforms readings private act into a rite of passage. The passage given voice dissolves the line between witness and witnessed. To read out loud makes the experience of reader and listener merge as one. Moreover, in spoken text, the voice of reader and writer bleed, becoming indissociable, intimately bound. Words are sonorous as much as signifying units. The soundness of a text tested by tongue and lips as much as by the mind. Certain language must be rolled in the mouth before it can be fully digested. Texts resonate at different frequencies according to their enunciation. New meanings are revealed by changed inflection, in the pauses and durations breathed between the words. Understanding is never wholly synchronous to the event of reading, nor is it reliant on grasping every word. A readers engagement with a text is often fractured or discontinuous, performed through a series of ellipses, loops and returns. Certain sections are lingered over, whilst others skimmed past. A single passage can become an impasse that leaves the reader stuck, or an opening that leads urgently in new directions. Different methods of reading can generate different registers of affect; there is scope for testing experimental tactics. With practice, language can be made to stretch or pucker, pulled thin and sheer as delicate gauze or gathered up into thick and impenetrable creases. Under scrutiny, text can be pressured into its component parts (of ink and page), the legibility of a word rendered nonsensical the closer it is apprehended. Close reading might not always attend to the nature of words themselves as signs. Other meanings emerge by looking at the materiality of words close up. However, insight is not gleaned by simply getting nearer to a text, for this will only amplify its detail, bringing it closer into range. Close reading can become myopic or shortsighted, blinkered to the bigger picture beyond the page. The act of looking harder, more forcefully, can cause a text to retreat or withdraw, for it might not respond well to such advances. Being open to the true force of a text requires a slower approach, the reader must learn to tarry, take her time. Yet, other meanings can only be glimpsed, caught fleetingly in the corner of the eye. A glimpse can collapse the totality of a text into a single word. Illumination can be kindled from the smallest flame. The significance of a text can take years to unravel; the impact of another can be felt in a lightening flash. The reading group is an assemblage composed of these different speeds and durations. A persons slow engagement with a text might melody unexpectedly with the quick or interruptive tempo of another. Understanding emerges rhythmically. Here, harmony is not the tethering of opinion to consensus, rather the agreement reached as different ideas begin to resonate or chime. The affect reader is not bound by the chronology of a texts unfolding. A readers attention can be activated mid-sentence or half way down a page. Texts do not always need to be read in a linear or logical way, but rather can be dipped into, allowing for detours and distractions. A single sentence might open in one book, close in another.

Poetic connections occur through chance encounters as the reader browses, casually thumbing pages in search of a memorable quote or evocative line. Fugitive phrases slip the grip of their original context, becoming lodged in the readers mind with the insistence of a musical refrain. Textual fragments become imperceptibly grafted into the readers thinking, or act as grafts onto which to suture new thought. One persons imagination provides a germinal ground for anothers, for anothers, for anothers. Yet, affect works in both directions; the reader must also bring. The now of an encounter with a written text is interwoven with memories and recollections from elsewhere, lateral interjections and asides. The axis of affective reading is one of verticality, of heights and depths, of uprisings and falls. Poetic or mnemonic forces disturb the horizontal logic of what is present on the page. A single word can become an invocation. Moreover, the written page is always porous, its surface absorbent. Writing can store the circumstances of both its own production and the context in which it is read. Some texts can never be fully dissociated from the situations in which they were first encountered. The pages of every book are invisibly inscribed with lifes ceaseless marginalia. Yet, as a text is often inflected by the lived conditions of its reception, the readers life can be affected irrevocably by what they have read. The impact of a text is impossible to discern in measurable terms; transformations take place at molecular level. Reading augments the readers capacity for further reading. Yet, it is not so much cognition that affective reading strengthens. Neither is the urge to read based on a craving for the fix of more and more texts. Rather, the action of reading helps to cultivate conation, expanding the readers capacity and desire to act. Reading is thus a movement towards becoming causal. Emma Cocker, 2012.
Written for the forthcoming publication, Edition IV: Affect The Affect Reader (to be published by If I Cant Dance I Dont Want to be Part of the Revolution, Amsterdam, 2013)